Summary10 years after his public breakdown over his wife's affair, former major league baseball announcer Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria) takes a job with the minor league Morristown Frackers in this comedy that began as a short video on the Funny Or Die website.
Summary10 years after his public breakdown over his wife's affair, former major league baseball announcer Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria) takes a job with the minor league Morristown Frackers in this comedy that began as a short video on the Funny Or Die website.
The other half of what makes Brockmire special--raunchy and depraved, but also surprisingly tender and even romantic (imagine Catastrophe if most of it took place at a minor league ballpark)--is how Azaria and the show’s creator, Joel Church-Cooper, are able to find the vulnerable human being underneath the accent and his familiar plaid blazer, even as Brockmire never breaks character or stops talking like he’s doing play-by-play on his own life.
Azaria and Peet are great, together and separately. Both bring a humor and sympathy to characters that might otherwise prove difficult to tolerate, let alone like.
Over the course of the eight episodes, Brockmire moves through a trio of arcs, delivering underdog sports hijinks, the Jules-Brockmire romance and Brockmire's sad and probably doomed search for redemption. That's all propped up with enough low-brow jokes, raunchy baseball references and disreputable hijinks that the show never wallows.
Brockmire doesn’t throw a perfect game on its first trip to the mound, but it gets most of its pitches across the plate--and even delivers some surprising dramatic brushbacks.
Later episodes suggest Brockmire will try to become a better person. That’s a bad call. The fun is watching him spin out of control like a drunk pitcher’s fastball.
Yes, this story’s kind of been told before, in various places, and in various forms over various decades--but with not nearly as many vulgar words called into service here.